vRealize brings workload definition and movement across your bit barn or public cloud

If it seems a little odd to suggest that a cloud of any sort can do without management, know that Cloud Foundation already offered the basic management tools that come with the three products – NSX, vSphere and VSAN – that come under its umbrella.

Those tools have made it possible for the like of OVH and IBM to use Cloud Foundation to stand up public VMware clouds and fulfil VMware's vision of the same software bundle running on-premises and in the cloud, for easy movement of data and applications.

VMware's now added its VMware vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations and vRealize Log Insight to Cloud Foundation. Doing so means users can now use a feature called “workload domains” - essentially a reference architecture expressed as software – across clouds. For service providers this means Cloud Foundation can spin up a rig designed for specific applications: if a customer wants VDI – shazaam! - it'll have its own virtual infrastructure. End-users can do likewise and know they can extend their infrastructure to a VMware-powered cloud that's tuned for the same needs.

Another handy change is support for heterogeneous servers, as in the past Cloud Foundation expected users would buy one model from one supplier. Now it can handle just about any x86-powered beast you throw it at, with one instance of Cloud Foundation to manage it all. Combined with workload domains this should allow the creation of pools of servers, each running applications to which they're best-suited, without the need for siloed management.

VMware's also updated NSX-T to support Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Doing so means NSX-T, VMWare's cut of NSX for hypervisors other than vSphere, can now play nice with the big three cloud-native frameworks – Kubernetes, OpenShift and Cloud Foundry. Pivotal's returned the favour by adding support for NSX-T to Cloud Foundry 2.0, announced yesterday. The new version of Cloud Foundry will also include a forthcoming serverless compute tool called "Pivotal Function Service" that can "trigger activity based on data sent by users or messaging systems like RabbitMQ or Apache Kafka."

Back to VMware, which is very excited about NSX-T, because it feels that containers are emerging from an experimental phase into real production apps, but that the network complexity they create when chained into microservices makes software-defined networking a necessity. ®